German Armed Forces Mod

[mondkalb 1087]

Happy lunchtime everyone, let me take you through the village of Rennau. :)
 

 

[R0adki11 3949]

13 minutes ago, mondkalb said:

Happy lunchtime everyone, let me take you through the village of Rennau. :)
 

Looks great. Are all you able to enter all of those buildings?

[EHolz 14]

Will there also be some sort of big city where one could make some house to house fighting?

 

[Polyus 139]

I'm still so confused...

[REFORGER88 144]

4 hours ago, Polyus said:

I'm still so confused...

It's a very groovy Cold War West Germany, what's to be confused about?

[Polyus 139]

9 hours ago, REFORGER88 said:

It's a very groovy Cold War West Germany, what's to be confused about?

I'm just confused about whether or not the old assets that were being shown (like the navy) are still going to be included.

[Kompetenzz 9]

So the German Navy part is dead, isn't it?

[Polyus 139]

4 hours ago, FOXtrot4 said:

So the German Navy part is dead, isn't it?

What makes you say that?

[Kompetenzz 9]

14 hours ago, Polyus said:

What makes you say that?

I haven't heard much about it lately

[mondkalb 1087]

Hello everyone, here's an update of what many of you were probably very curious about:

The border fortifications.

I finished with the many villages in the west and I am now tackling the border strip before I go into building up the east. So far I have only completed the enemy-facing part of the border, but it is already very spooky.
I'm still working daily on this. :)

[wsxcgy 1960]

Beautiful as always.

[dk-vcb 31]

bloody german efficiency

 

[Landrik 49]

Great! I love the attention to detail!

[mondkalb 1087]

Heya everyone!

I wanted to share some more details today, as the projects have been progressing at a tremendous speed currently. First off the pictures for those of you with short attention spans. :P

 

By now a majority of the settlements on this massive 20.48 x 20.48km terrain have been assembled. In fact, 32 of 46 in total are built.
As I am progressing through these I am finishing up my assets as well (All buildings have fully modeled interiors and I have already begun making partial destruction states).

While I am loving all the progress I am making and and I am indeed steadily approaching the final state, I get more and more worried about how this massive new library of assets will be abused by the various people who do not care about content owner's rights and will plunge in happily exploiting my work on their monetized roleplay server communities.

This makes me multiple-sad, as not only will my work be exploited for monetary gain, but I am also very sure that stupid, disrespectful - and worst of all - very inaccurate "escape" missions trying to "simulate" an escape from East Germany into West Germany will be made. Or other related RPG events around this, along the lines of "East German Life" and other such things. I absolutely WILL NOT allow any of these. My heart in this project is military cold war gone hot, the original Arma/OFP type of game...
And it really sickens me that I am already receiving requests about "free use" of my terrain from these types of communities. Worst of all, I don't know what I can do against this other than not release it, which I don't want to do. However, I am still on the fence about this.

I have studied these border fortifications very closely, and I am extremely satisfied with their authenticity. I am actually so confident about these that I have planned to write and produce a small documentary about the Inner German border in this sector during 1983, the time where the fortifications were the deadliest. I believe this border complex is a very unknown part of history. It is - if at all - just briefly mentioned as a side note in history lessons when the Berlin Wall is brought up as a topic, which is again not done everywhere on the world. Actually this is one of the big reasons I am actually making this terrain: I want this to serve as a great new medium for exploring history: It is visually present, easy to access, explore and interact with. I have also plans for a small interactive "museum guide" for this terrain that will be bundled with the terrains release where you can learn about the fortifications and all the background information I have gathered over the course of this project.

This does stand somewhat contrary to what I said earlier about the "escape simulations", but please try to understand the difference here: One way is using this map as a time-machine and museum park to go exploring in, to make it visible what once existed so clearly and crassly across germany and is now almost completely gone, while the other way is a pretend re-enactment of a situation that is impossible to accurately recreate in arma. This is not due to technical limitations with Arma, it is a problem with immersion and abstraction that does not allow recreation in any way other than actually having to live through it. Reliving any of this is should never be the goal. The goal should be to make visible what disappeared and decayed over the course of time.

I am absolutely fine with missions playing out a NATO vs Warsaw Pact invasion across the border in a cold-war-gone-hot scenario. This "traditional" military scenario is very interesting and Arma is (will be ;)) absolutely suitable to make this a believable and intriguing experience.

But a "Border troops vs. Civilians"-Scenario is the worst possible thing in my eyes. For one because of Arma's technical limitations, but mainly because there is no way to make the players on both sides of such a scenario understand and assume character in/of what was going on. There is no game design on this world that will convey to a player the desparation needed to risk a likely death by attempting to clear through this border complex.

A similar thing has to be said about the Border Troops: In East Germany military service was mandatory if you wanted to have any progress in any more sophisticated choice of career, especially if you wanted to be eligible for higher education. This military service included with a certain probability to be assigned the border troops and be posted at the border. I don't see a good way to convey the dilemma these soldiers would face when they found themselves in a situation where it was their responsibility to stop an escapee by any means necessary. It is such a topic full of canned worms that I really don't want to take this lighly, or worse: Judgemental. The entire complex of political indoctrination, that was such a massive factor in keeping the walls up for so long, cannot even be fathomed. So just don't do it, even though my digital museum makes it very easy to do. It may not be so obvious with this map here. If you had a concentration camp recreated in Arma, It's the most obvious thing that you wouldn't do a camp simulator. That's the point I am trying to drive here.

These details are what I hope to shine a light on in my "documentary", which hope will be used as a substitute by anyone who has the urge to make any kind of GDR Secret Police roleplay missions.

Oh wow, what a wall of text. But I wanted to voice my opinion about this early on and that it is actually something that keeps me thinking and re-thinking a release of this project.

[REFORGER88 144]

Oh boy. I love how quickly such high quality progress has been made. I absolutely can't wait to begin my Able Archer Campaign, and the 83 timeline fits perfectly! The complexities and possibilities of total war in that period fascinate me to no end, and I'm glad to see someone else putting so much effort into a faithful replication of a facet of that. 

[Archer337 8]

Amazing how much this project is coming along, I've been looking forward to eventually getting my hands on this since both myself, and my own community members are really wishing to pull off some alternative scenarios for the Cold War, it's something I believe that ArmA 3 is lacking sadly, this project seems to look to be a nice refreshing experience. The custom buildings look really, really nice followed with the terrain as a whole, I can see that a lot of research has been put into this and the progress / presentation really shows over the updates with each update shown to us.

 

I do hope you release this, instead of worrying about these communities ruining it for the rest of us. But I can understand why it would feel terrible if these servers even attempted to create those types of scenarios and the reluctance to release it for that reason and the sensitivity behind it. Those types of communities are honestly a blight to the ArmA community as a whole, but I'm not going to go too much into that.

 

Over-all though, Keep up the great work and don't let them discourage you, a lot of time and effort has been put into this to let it go to waste now, I'm really looking forward to see what else is going to be brought to the table! 

[Pictureclass 19]

I was born and i grew up directly at the Border on the East Side (Check for Schierke on Google Maps). I cant remember much about it, but my parents and gradparents told their experiences they made with respect and fear. I truly can understand your thoughts about these kinds of servers and communitys. And I appeal to everyone, to take the work of mondkalb as an reason to learn something from and about it. Take the possibility to sharpen your mind and use this work with respect to all the people which suffer under the german border.

[Reddiem 508]

Will there be a chance for the map without the fence ?

 

ps

 

very good work

Edited September 6, 2017 by Reddiem

[Fanatic72 181]

Absolutely amazing work there. Looking forward to some good old cold war battles.

However I dont understand the "escape" mission concern. Its a map for a game where people play as suicide bombers or nazi germans or whatever fictional scenario they come up with. I find this a little bit too PC (kinda like banning swastikas from WW2 games). But its your map so whatever you dont like ...its all up to you. 

Keep up the great work!

[fingolfin 1972]

1 hour ago, Reddiem said:

Will there be a chance for the map without the fence ?

 

ps

 

very good work

 

It is/was far more than just a fence. So, a map without the border fortifications would require a lot of work and atleast a new satmap.

[nomisum 129]

@mondkalb I wouldnt spend too much thought how your (insanely good looking) map will be put to use. You cant expect it to be more than an nudge for players to inform themselves on the topic — be it via thoughtful loading messages or detailed recreation of border assets. Its a sandbox after all and everything released is used both in awesome and stupid ways. Though I understand its a delicate topic for you personally, not all players will feel that way, even more so when they dont have german roots.

 

@Reddiem I'm sure it will be possible to hide all border objects with the new hideTerrainObjects Module if not via script. You would have to fill the gaps yourselves, but it's a great solution if a map needs some temporary adjustments.

[Hamakaze 142]

It's nice to see more Cold War themed maps and assets coming to ArmA 3 something that i think has been sorely lacking... It'll be nice to have them if you do choose to release them despite the concerns you mentioned but i'd understand if you dont.

[Landrik 49]

 

 

Can't wait to unleash the

B U N D E S B O I S

[CarolusRex12 4]

Ready to meet the western imperialists 

 

[GalComT 509]

GAF is Dead, Long live GM